Katharine “Kate” Bowman, 15, hikes in the local mountains near Mt. Baldy on July 7. She has fond memories of hiking Mt. Baldy with her father, Harry “Hal” Bowman, who died in the Dec. 2, 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino.

Harry Bowman was one of the 14 victims of the December 2, 2015 terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.

But for 15-year-old Katharine “Kate” Bowman they have helped her remember her father since he was killed in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack. Events of the past year also offered inspiration and a new calling in the world of politics for the Upland teenager.

“The feeling of missing him comes through little moments and memories,” Katharine said of her father, Harry “Hal” Bowman, in an email earlier this month. “His loud, funny-sounding laugh,” kayaking, whale watching, museum visits, that aloha Thanksgiving – “all little things that I never really thought about until he was gone.”

Bowman, a 46-year-old Upland resident, was a statistical analyst with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health’s Division of Environmental Health Services. He had been with the division a few months before the attack at the Inland Regional Center.

A favorite memory of Katharine’s is climbing Mount Baldy, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, with him.

“The entire climb was really fun and took longer than expected because we kept stopping to talk or look out at the view or look at a specific rock with a really interesting geological history that Dad just really had to take a picture of,” she wrote.

When they reached the top, it was time to rest. And talk.

“We talked about the most random stuff, most of which I don’t remember in the slightest,” she wrote. “But, it was just the two of us out in our mountains on a beautiful day.”

Katharine has continued hiking those mountains with her mother, Karen Fagan, her father’s ex-wife, and her sister, Elizabeth Bowman, 12.

But life isn’t as carefree any more.

Now she stands near doors and gets anxious when there are no open exits.

“Logically, I know that nothing will happen, but there’s still a significant part of my mind that remembers that everyone in the San Bernardino shooting thought that, too,” she wrote. “Afterwards, I realized how much comfort I had taken in thinking that nothing that bad could ever happen to me. But, it happened to my dad and it happened to my family and now I no longer have that comfort.”

Despite the tension, she has found herself turned off by the hate and divisiveness that she has seen well up since the attack.

“More division and fear is not what the United States needs,” Katharine wrote. “We need compassion and unity.”

She and her family joined about 200 others for a sometimes tearful speech in January by President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House. It solidified her belief in the president’s gun control proposal, what she believes is “common sense.”

“The day that I came back from the President’s gun control announcement in D.C., I decided that I wanted to go into politics and that I wouldn’t be silent anymore,” she said.

Katharine applied for and is now studying at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington D.C., which offers high school juniors a semester focusing on international studies and thoughtful leadership development.

“I decided that change wasn’t happening fast enough,” she wrote, “and that it was my responsibility to do something about it.”